Barbara Hambly's Blog, page 51

Further Adventures of Further Adventures

Bugs in the system - fooey. SiteMistress informs me that people have been getting multiple copies of stories purchased - she's shut down Further Adventures for the time being (should be back up within the day, I think - she's REALLY good). So... we're working on the problem.

Stay tuned for an update post on its status.

Best in Show

And, we did the Molly's Mutts 'n' Meows fund-raiser yard sale today - all day. My best friend is in the organization, and basically she said they needed a driveway and a bathroom on the West Side. Scads of volunteers showed up, we had MAJOR donations from a dozen different sources,so this was a far better yard sale than the usual, We're Cleaning Our Closets family type. (I got the major Purple Drop of the day, a close-to-new color printer for a VERY reasonable price - plus a number of silk sh...

We're Live!

"Pretty Polly" and "A Night With the Girls" are on the website.

For those of you just joining me, my website - barbarahambly.com - has a section called "The Further Adventures Of..." in which I write short stories about the character-sets from my various Del Rey fantasy serieses, for $5 a  download via PayPal.

Deb has re-formatted for this release, so the stories are now available in pdf, epub, and mobi.

She warns that there may be some teething troubles with the formatting, so let us know if yo...

Pretty Polly

Finished the Gil & Ingold story "Pretty Polly." Another day to comb and fluff it, within a week it should - I hope - be up on the website (for those of you who've joined since November, that'll be barbarahambly.com , in the section of the website called The Further Adventures Of... where I sell my own original short fiction about the characters from my old Del Rey serieses, for $5 a download).(pdf's, through PayPal).(Which I write in my copious non-existent spare time).

Along with it I'll uploa...

Dumpage and gardenias

One of the things that I most treasure that George bought me (other than the giant Actual Book version of the OED) is a MAMMOTH gardenia bush, which covers itself in white, waxy bloom at this time of year and scents the porch: nothing like fake gardenia scent in perfumes. Gardenias were his favorite flowers; he wore one in his buttonhole at our wedding.

The blossoms are just in time, this year, for the fund-raiser yard sale which I'll be hosting for my friend Laurie's cat rescue organization ...

jury duty

Jury duty - which means, no WoW Thursday evening (getting in slightly too late to make it at 6, and, since I'm seriously late on a project, I am working til bedtime - something I hate to do - after getting in from the jury room).

Fortunately it looks like a short case. My great fear was that I'd get on a long case and end up having to be on the jury til 4:30, then have to drive out to the school in rush-hour traffic and teach til 10.

And - also fortunately - the courts are "on furlough" tomorr...

Calling all Latin scholars

Ok all you Latinists out there...
How do you make an adjective from a noun in Latin?
manus = hand (m, I believe)
cicatrix = scar (f)
How do you say, "scarred hand"?

graduation

One of my pet peeves - which always enrages me when I drive the freeways - is those dorks who use the shoulder as a passing-lane: who pull out of stopped traffic to the right, and roar down the shoulder at freeway speeds as far as they can, then think people who've been waiting like good citizens where they should be, should let them back in again.

Well, yesterday afternoon - as I was on my way to the college for the Faculty Gala and graduation ceremonies - somebody did this on the 405 Freeway...

*sigh*

Every semester, I warn my students not to cherry-pick through the Multiple-Choice portion of the exams in quest of bits of information wherewith to make it sound like they know something about items on the "Short-Paragraph Identification" portion of the exam - that only works if you choose the correct Multiple-Choice answer to crib from. Otherwise, you end up writing that Joseph Smith was the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, and that the Underground Railroad was a very long secret underground pas...

Finals

Crows have an air-base somewhere in my neighborhood. On gray mornings like this one - typical of California in June - when everything seems so still, their cawing sounds very loud, and these days there's groups of half a dozen or more, squabbling and cursing at each other as they sit on the house-tops and telephone lines. I think they're the spring's nestlings, grown up and hanging out and thinking they're way cooler than they are, sort of like the students around the coffee-shop at the colle...